X86-secret have thrown up the second part of their AMD K8 - Athlon 64 vs. All! which includes benchmarks of AMD's Athlon 64 FX-51 and Intel's Pentium 4 Extreme Edition Processor! Here's a google translation as the sites in French.

The purpose of second part of our trilogy, this article is to compare the performances of Athlon 64 with its principal rivals. Having a final platform now, we can note the results of the new racehorse of AMD. After quickly having flown over the improvement brought by K8 architecture , we will present the platforms on tests as well as the various software used. As we wanted this test most complete possible, we compared Athlon 64 with Pentium 4, but also in Opteron and Athlon XP.

Intel is probably a bit disappointed with the overwhelming success of the 865 chipset... despite it being their own chipset, they would obviously want more buyers interested in the more expensive 875 chipset. But alas, things are getting so bleedin' fast that good enough truly is good enough (just hopefully not at the cost of quality). Thus, SIS wants to try and direct some of that budget-enthusiasm towards their new 648FX chipset. Let's see if it is worth your attention.

Nordic Hardware sends word they've snagged some exclusive Info from Abit on a new mainboard the KV8-MAX3 for AMD's upcoming Athlon64 cpu.

The specifications of the board are pretty similar to the ones of ABIT IC7-MAX3 with Gigabit LAN, SecureIDE, FireWire, S-ATA RAID (6 SATA-channels all together) and 6-channels audio. There is one big difference to the IC7-MAX3 though, and that is the integrated ìGuru-CPU we reported about earlier.

Loooking for a ATi Radeon 9800 Pro but not sure which brand to buy? then head this way to OC Prices, who have thrown up their six card shootout!

The Radeon 9800 Pro is without a doubt the dominant force in the high-end graphics card market. It has the performance ? without image quality cheats ? to run the latest Direct X 9.0 titles without having to reduce settings to an unacceptable level.

Just spotted this bit of news over at Rage 3D.

In what's gotta be a weird story, Anandtech is reporting that the RADEON 9800 XT which The Inquirer rumors to be a 415 MHz 9800 Pro derivative has hit store shelves before it's even announced. Anand is one of the more trusted names in the biz, so I guess the name, at least is confirmed.

Sound Blaster® Audigy® 2 ZS delivers 24-bit ADVANCED HD? audio quality playback with incredible 108dB SNR. It delivers the highest resolution audio playback with support for DVD-Audio at 24-bit/192kHz in stereo or 24-bit/96kHz in 5.1 surround in addition to industry leading standards, like THX®-certification and Windows Media 9: 24-bit multi-channel audio format.

The Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS also provides encompassing 7.1 surround sound for Dolby Digital® EX as well as DTS-ES supported DVD movies, any DirectSound 3D games, an improved Creative MediaSource Player and CMSS 3D virtualized 7.1 stereo music. Musicians will also enjoy true 24-bit recording and low latency ASIO support for the ultimate audio recording platform.

Xbitlabs have posted a rumour that Nvidia may have taped out NV40? Here's a rip.

Unofficial sources report that Samsung supplied some 10 thousands of its recently announced 1600MHz GDDR2 memory chips with extreme speed to NVIDIA for samples of the code-named NV40 GPU-based graphics cards.

The Inquirer hat gestern einige Spezifikationen des neuen S3 Grafikchips "Deltachrom" veröffentlicht, wenn die Daten das halten was sie versprechen, kann der Chip ein echter Herausforderer zu ATI und Nvidia sein.

Spezifikationen im Vergleich High End:

Unter mehr gibt es die Daten für Mainstream und Value

The Inquirer has an article about the new DeltaChrome S3 video card. Seems that the F1 model is going to give an hard time to ATI and nVidia thanks to a clearly superior peak bandwidth and a great Pixel Fillrate.

Thanks to Mackey D for pointing me in the direction of this German website that is listing AMD's Athlon64 3200+ Clawhammer with 128K of level one cache, and 1024K of level two cache! MMX, SSE, SSE2, AMD64 and supports memory modules at the following speeds DDR200, DDR266 , DDR333 and comes clocked at 2 Ghz and costs 499.00 EUROS

YOU'RE NOT GONNA believe this. I mean, really, you're not, because I wouldn't have either, had I not seen it with my own eyes. S3 Graphics is back with a new chip, dubbed DeltaChrome, which looks like it might just be strong enough to become a player in the mid-range consumer graphics market. I've seen the A0 silicon, first spin of the chip, running games like Unreal Tournament 2003 and the Chrome demo well enough to convince me the thing has potential. Real potential.

Just got word that Beyond3D have scoop a photo of ATi's PCI Express card!

The graphics board in question is a native PCI-Express chip, without a bridge chip of any kind. Although ATI are stating that this is "a demonstration of a future unannounced part" the board configuration and size of the heatsink would tend to indicate that this is a chip derived from an RV350 class chip.

Hold on to your expense accounts. We've rounded up the latest workstation CPUs and motherboards for an all-out workstation platform brawl. The Xeons are paired up, ready to take on the Opterons in tag-team action. Also on the card is NVIDIA's brawny nForce3 Pro, which is eyeing its upstart competition, VIA's ripped K8T800, with curious suspicion. What's more, the Athlon XP 3200+ and Pentium 4 3.2GHz have agreed to join us for some inter-conference action, giving the our contenders a shot at the unified world title belt. Will the young Opterons upstage the mighty Xeons? Can the mysterious K8T800 really take a punch? Will this metaphor fail completely before I get to the end of this paragraph? Keep reading to find out.

HardwareZone have thrown up a 26 page Athlon XP vs. Pentium 4 : The Ultimate 32-bit CPU Showdown.

There were a total of 19 different benchmarks conducted in this review and all of these tests were ran on 11 different processor speeds. The processors tested were :-

Intel yesterday announced a new CPU, developed especially for gamers and the answer to AMD´s Athlon FX.
German magazine Golem reports that the processor will be available by the end of october or beginning of november 2003. Burns demonstrated consumer products that are available today or will be in the near future. This included a high-definition video stream running on a previously unannounced desktop processor, the Intel® Pentium® 4 processor Extreme Edition 3.20 GHz supporting Hyper-Threading Technology1, with an additional 2 Megabytes of cache. This new processor will be targeted at high-end gamers and computing power users. More informations available at Intel press release or at The Inquirer

Intel wird allem Anschein nach Ende Oktober - Anfang November- einen neuen Prozessor speziell für Spieler auf den Markt werfen, der den von AMD entwickelten Athlon FX das fürchten lehren soll.

Das berichtet der Onlinedienst Golem.

Bei dem Pentium 4 HT Extreme Edition soll es sich laut Intel um einen Pentium 4 mit 3,2 GHz, 800-MHz-Systembus und Hyperthreading handeln. Neben den 512 KByte Level-2-Cache, die standardmäßig im normalen 3,2-GHz-Modell des Pentium 4 stecken, kommen beim Athlon-FX-Gegner jedoch noch 2 MByte Level-3-Cache hinzu, so dass der Prozessor-Kern dem des Xeon entsprechen dürfte. Louis Burns, Vizepräsident und Co-General Manager von Intels Desktop-Plattform-Abteilung, nannte zwar keine weiteren Details und verzichtete auf Benchmark-Werte, erklärte aber während der kurzen Vorstellung des Produkts, dass der Leistungsschub großartig sei. Mehr Infos darüber gibt es bei Golem.

Rainer Teschke hat sich mal wieder 2 Schmuckstücke zum testen besorgt, diesmal sorgt er mit einer Weltpremiere des Adaptec 7 fach USB 2.0 Hub für Aufsehen, desweitern hat der den Deltatonic PC getestet.

Adaptec 7 fach USB 2.0 Hub: Der vorher verwendete Hub (Angabe des Herstellers USB 2.0 getestet!) bremste unsere Festplatte völlig aus und auch das Netzteil gab ein sehr leises Netzbrummen von sich. Die Mehrkosten von nur ca. 30,- Euro gegenüber einem einfachen Standard HUB sind sind auf jedenfalls gerechtfertigt und man sollte hier nicht an der falschen Ecke sparen und sich mit Leistungseinbrüchen und Netzbrummen herumärgern. Der Test Deltatonic PC: Ebenso wurde die GPU Heatpipe verstärkt und jetzt wird diese auch um 90 Grad abgewinkelt und zeigt nach oben, was die Kühlleistung alleine Aufgrund der veränderten Einbauweise erheblich verbessert. Zum Test

XGI, found in May 2003 today announced the Volari serie which contains seven new graphic cards. Three of them are for the mobile market, and four are for the desktop market. The aim of these new DirectX9 graphics cards is to compete with ATi's Radeon and Nvidia's FX.

DangerDen is no newbie when it comes to watercooling, they're globally known, and well respected. The maze4 waterblock has been reviewed over at a couple of hardware sites, but for some reason I can't seem to find a review on a full setup containing the maze4, let's change that.

Watercooling will probably be the next step in cooling, aircooling just doesn't cut it anymore. Intel's newest CPU: Prescott, will dissipate over 100W (103W to be precise), normal cooling just can't handle that amount. Some GPU's (Graphics Proceesing Units) already have a watercooling setup, look at the high-end Gainward cards.

Just spotted this bit of info over at Xbitlabs.com.

Just a couple of days ago a reader very close to Austin, Texas laboratory told me that the code-named K9 CPU has been in development for just about six month. The project K9 hit the drawing board, but no silicon has been touched at all, he added. Despite of these facts, a Japanese web-site PC Watch issued some preliminary information about the next-generation CPUs from AMD.